Heart and head are split over the monarchy. The moral case for a Republic is unassailable, yet I was filled with delight at yesterday’s pageantry. How to rationalise this?
I think it’s a form of what we call Making The Best of a Bad Job. A useful comparison is with the Premier League, a more regular spectacle. The way that league is commercially arranged is clearly damaging to football as a whole, and ticket-buying fans do not get value for money. Yet that doesn’t stop us thrilling at another close run title race, or another brilliant goal by the most obnoxious of the overpaid stars, Wayne Rooney.
In the sphere of politics, I entirely object to the counter-productive format of Prime Minister’s Questions, a barrier if ever there was one to reasoned policy-making. Yet, while it exists, I can enjoy the event and value the fact that our leaders can be held to account in such a robust manner.
So it with the Royal Wedding. I can hold that the Hereditary principle has no place, however ceremonial, in modern politics. But while it exists I can enjoy a history lesson that incorporates Bank Holiday drinking, street parties (including one in London a quarter of a million people strong), and the the pinnacle of UK fashion design. This not principle in action, but pragmatism. Making do with what we have. A very British trait, no?
Month: April 2011 (Page 1 of 2)
Our culture continues to be defined by the screen and the lens. The works of Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol remain disturbingly current. Politics continues to be defined by image, not ideas, to the extent that the Leader of the Labour Party feels the need to have work done on his sinuses (or something), the better to appeal to floating voters.
One area of interest for me is the collision of the media with ordinary people – and by that, I mean those who find themselves caught like rabbits in the spot-light, as opposed to those who seek it out. In particular, the sub-genre of media Death Coverage. The visual grammar of a press conference is fascinating. I have also written before on how the images of the recently dead are manipulated to fit an established template (even when the deceased was very different to how they are described).
Issy Jones-Reilly in The Times
Issy Jones-Reilly in The Evening Standard
The sad death of Issy Jones-Reilly who overdosed at a party last weekend, has sent me back to this subject once more. The pictures of this pretty girl have featured heavily in the papers for a couple of days. What I have found noteworthy is that in almost all cases, the picture illustrating the victim has been a self-portrait. In this era of cheap digital imaging, that means an arms length shot, with the camera (or smart-phone) pointed back down at the photographer. The arm must necessarily extend outside the shot, and the wide-angle distorts and swells the face a little. It’s the polar opposite of professional portraiture, where the subjects are lit from the sides and rear and a narrower angle lens is used to put the face in better proportions.
I find these images of Issy quite sad. First, of course, that she only found fame in death. When she took those photos of herself she was engaging in a form of sel-promotion (I don’t doubt they were used as Facebook profile pictures at some point). She would never know the context in which those photos would finally be used. It seems to me quite tragic that, for her allotted 15 minutes of fame, she had to take her own photos.
Meanwhile, an accomplished and quite brilliant photographer suffers the indignity of having his own death illustrated by someone else. The case of Tim Hetherington, killed in Libya last week, was not quite as bad as that of Meredith Kercher (whose death was illustrated by the prettier of her alleged killers). However, I still found it odd and a little disrespectful that Hetherington’s death was reported in The Evening Standard by a picture of his girlfriend. A perfectly serviceable image of the man who actually died was relegated to the inner pages. Of course we know that pretty girls are always the choice of photo editors. But in this case, when the subject was a fellow journalist, I thought the Standard editors’ cynical bid for eyeballs was particularly crass.
Tim Hetherington’s girlfriend
Tim Hetherington in The Evening Standard
Here’s Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus, discussing differing views on human behaviour and how that affects political ideology:
Assumptions that people are selfish can become self-fulfilling prophecies, creating systems that provide lots of individual freedom to act but not a lot of public value or management of collective resources for the greater public good. Systems designed around assumptions of selfishness can also crowd out solutions that could arise when people communicate with one another and enter into agreements that they jointly monitor and enforce. Conversely, systems that assume people will act in ways that create public goods, and that give them opportunities and rewards for doing so, often let them work together better than neoclassical economics would predict.
I think this is as good a description as any as to why some people end up as small-c conservatives and others as small-s socialists. The latter is the view that I tend to, one that seems inherently more optimistic about human nature than conservatives or indeed libertarians would have us believe.
Shirky goes on to describe how neoclassical economics, which prizes the firm and enterprise as the most efficient form of collaboration, prevailed (in the 20th Century) over the socialist, state-led alternative. However, the rest of Cognitive Surplus goes on to describe models of co-ordination that are neither market-driven or state-sponsored. OpenSource projects like Linux and Apache and user-generated websites like Wikipedia are obvious examples. The Third Way is often used to describe a centrism, that combines elements of capitalism and socialism. Private companies as the best way to improve public services, and all the other ideas that defines the approach (and inspired the name ) of my alma mater, the Social Market Foundation. However, a not-for-profit, “commons” approach seems a much better definition of a Third Way – a genuinely different method of co-ordination, not just a split-the-difference compromise.
Moreover, this idea of community project building on a not-for-profit basis seems very close to David Cameron’s Big Society! I am still reading Cognitive Surplus so cannot comment on Shirky’s overall conclusions, but I suspect that Big Society-type alternatives to capitalism and command-and-control will be presented. The question is – Can we use our cognitive surplus to deliver essential services? OpenSource media? Definitely. Maybe even banking and transport. But hospitals?
Yesterday, English PEN took part in a demonstration with other free speech organisations outside the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan. We demanded the release of Eynulla Fatullayev, and editor who was imprisoned for defamation of the state (i.e. criticising the government), a law which it is generally agreed is an infringement of the right to free expression.
During the demo we made a short video, featuring yrstrly.
The protest was convened in part to show solidarity with Azeri writers and Fatullayev’s family, so providing a translation was essential. After edting it, we used a nifty tool called CaptionTube to create subtitle tracks for the video.
Photos are available too:
‘Her Eyes’ by Ranoush on Flickr. Creative Commons Licence.
Having complained earlier this week about The Times reposting wire copy behind their paywall, its now time to point out that some writing is worth paying for. Despite his Toryness, I think Matthew Parris is one of the most honest and eloquent columnists writing today.
Last Saturday he returned to the subject of burkas, and other religious and cultural uniforms, making an attempt to articulate why he and other British people might find such uniforms uncomfortable:
I wonder whether it really is only the burka’s particular capacity to hide the face that nettles us. I believe there’s something more: that we see the decision to wear a burka as an insult, however passive, to ourselves; that we take the wearing of this veil as an expression of rejection by the wearer, or her husband, of the culture and society in which they live. We think that they are trying symbolically to shut us out, to define themselves against us. We think we see the uniform of an alien grouping: a passive-aggressive shunning of the host country.
Now this isn’t fair. Many burka wearers would be wearing burkas too in the countries from which their families come. But it is a fact I cannot deny that when I walk the pavements of Whitechapel in East London and pass women in the full black veil whom I sense do not want to acknowledge or speak to me, I feel very slightly affronted. I can’t help this. To any Muslim reader who may protest that I ought not to feel like that, I must, in all sincerity, give this reply: however you think non-Muslims ought to react to the full veil, this is how we always will. You’ll have to take it as a given.
An accepted wisdom of modern sociology is that racial insult is to some degree in the eye of the individual offended, rather than the intention of the offender. If this argument cuts one way, it must cut the other too. On this page yesterday Hugo Rifkind argued that race and culture are sideshows, and it’s all about jobs and economic competition: a powerful argument that I flatly reject. Poles are taking our jobs; burka wearers aren’t. But Poles are quite popular in Britain.
If I’m right about the wearing of religious or cultural uniforms that define the adherent against — as it were — the world in which he finds himself, then this would explain the slight hostility I feel (and must immediately combat in myself) on encountering groups of Hassidim with ringleted hair, in black hats, thick spectacles and heavy black coats. What is wrong with the rest of us (I hear myself mutter) that you want to separate yourselves from us in this aggressive-looking way? I feel it a bit with nuns, too. I feel it with stud-pierced youths with spikes on their lips: “Why do you hate our world so much?” I sense myself silently asking.
Then there are the shouty crucifixes that seem to announce that the rest of us are on the wrong side of a sheep- versus-goats divide. I’ve not the slightest doubt that those orange- swathed Hare Krishna people you see on the London pavement are the most harmless creatures alive, but their uniform is telling me that they’re special, and I’m not; and I don’t react well to that. I’ve even felt this with the wearing of the Jewish skullcap in a secular, mixed and workaday environment: “Ok, but why do you need to wear that thing?” a voice within me says — to which another, fairer, one replies: “And why shouldn’t he? Must he justify to you what he puts on his head?”
Its also possible to feel the opposite. When I walk between the saris and sarwar kamises on Tooting High Street or Ealing Broadway, it makes me feel cosmopolitian, international, and worldly (although I would be lying if I said I was not similarly puzzled by Burkas). Regardless of my personal feelings, I appreciate Parris’s article because he acknowledges that we are intelligent animals, capable of introspection. We may have certain inate fears about ‘The Other’ (be they Muslims, Jews, or Hare Krishnas) but we are equally capable of some rudimentary self-psychoanalysis. We are not slaves to our fears or our gut instincts – we can transcend them in favour of a shared humanity.
Acknowledging our discomfort over migrants is the start of a conversation about ourselves, our country, and our species. Contra to what both David Cameron and Ed Miliband seem to be saying, such feeling are not a legitimate reason to criticise immigration policy. Portraying white Britons as uniformly panicked and distrubed by the changing face of our community is patronising and simplistic, and may even legitimise the reactionary views of the Far Right.